🚀 go-pugleaf

Tom Rocklin wrote:

>There is an argument that says, roughly, that knowing the details of the
>neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of an organism (I'm particularly interested
>in humans) will still leave you ignorant  of important details
>of the psychology of that organism.
.
<stuff deleted>
.
>much about Unix itself.  Similarly, knowing the details of the brain (and
>the rest of the relevant system(s)) will tell you some constraints on the
>psychology of an organism, but not much more.

>I'd be happy to hear comments on this argument (which I'm neither endorsing
>nor rejecting), but more importantly, I'd appreciate pointers to published
>versions of the argument (and related arguments).                ^^^^^^^^^

There have been studies of this sort using lower animals (i.e. insects)
as models.  The argument in these systems is that it might be possible,
given an accurate enough model of the animal, its anatomy and physiology,
along with an accurate model of its environment, one could accurately
model the behavior of the animal.  This also assumes that you can 
condition the model to have the same learned behaviors found in the 
animal, something that should be possible in the insect model (given its 
limited memory and greater dependence on instincts/reflexes) but much harder to
do with something as complex as a human.

Some published work for this argument would be:

Vehicles, experiments in synthetic psychology / Valentino Braitenberg.
	Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1984.

Braitenberg memoirs: vehicles for probing behavior roam a dark
	plain marked by lights. (Valentino Braitenberg; Computer
	Recreations) by A.K. Dewdney, Scientific American March 1987, 
	v256, p16(5)

An artificial insect. (computer-simulated insects) by Randall
	D. Beer, J. Hillel Chiel and Leon S. Sterling, 
	American Scientist Sept-Oct 1991, v79, n5, p444(9), 


-- 
Karl R Altenburg				altenbur@plains.NoDak.edu
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND  58105

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.  SIR THOMAS BROWNE